Behind the Book

Oct 26 2024 158 ep. 58 mins 14

Behind the Book Podcast artwork

Interviews with University of Nebraska Press authors.

Arts History Education

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Peter Sarandinaki, "In Search of the Romanovs: A Family's Quest to Solve One of History's Most Brutal Crimes" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Oct 26 2024 43 mins

In Search of the Romanovs: A Family's Quest to Solve One of History's Most Brutal Crimes (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is a thrilling, true-life detective story about the search for the missing members of the Romanov royal family, murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, and one family's involvement in the hundred-year-old forensic investigation into their deaths, clandestine burials

Benjamin Bergholtz, "Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Oct 21 2024 52 mins

Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel (U Nebraska Press, 2024) offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it’s typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. Bergholtz considers a selection of massive and meanderi

Yolonda Youngs, "Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Oct 09 2024 65 mins

Perhaps no American landscape is as iconic as the rainbow rocks of Arizona's Grand Canyon. Yet, as the geographer Yolonda Youngs argues, the Grand Canyon many people think they know is but one sliver of the story of the wider Grand Canyon as a historical and physical place. In Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon (U Nebraska Press, 2024), Youngs, a

Waitman Wade Beorn, "Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Sep 27 2024 88 mins

Waitman Wade Beorn's book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, Janowska remains one of the least-known sites of the Holocaust, despite being one of the deadliest. Simultane

David Kroening Seitz, "A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

Sep 20 2024 59 mins

A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradit

Derek Taira, "Forward without Fear: Native Hawaiians and American Education in Territorial Hawai'i, 1900-1941" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Jul 27 2024 52 mins

During Hawai‘i’s territorial period (1900–1959), Native Hawaiians resisted assimilation by refusing to replace Native culture, identity, and history with those of the United States. By actively participating in U.S. public schools, Hawaiians resisted the suppression of their language and culture, subjection to a foreign curriculum, and denial of their cultural heritage and hi

James Mallery, "City of Vice: Transience and San Francisco's Urban History, 1848-1917" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Jul 16 2024 65 mins

San Francisco began its American life as a city largely made up of transient men, arriving from afar to participate in the gold rush and various attendant enterprises. This large population of men on the move made the new and booming city a hub of what "respectable" easterners considered vice: drinking, gambling, and sex work, among other activities. In City of Vice: Transience an

David H. Wilson, "Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

Jun 29 2024 61 mins

Between the mid-19th century and the start of the twentieth century, the Northern Paiute people of the Great Basin went from a self-sufficient tribe well-adapted to living on the harsh desert homelands, to a people singled out by the Native activist Henry Roe Cloud for their dire social and economic position. The story of how this happened is told in Northern Paiutes of the Malheu

Shannon Bontrager, "Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)

Jun 11 2024 101 mins

Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address ma

Daniel P. Ott, "Harvesting History: McCormick's Reaper, Heritage Branding, and Historical Forgery" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

May 20 2024 64 mins

Cyrus McCormick invented the revolutionary mechanical reaper in 1831...right? At least, that's how the story has been told for decades. In Harvesting History: McCormick's Reaper, Heritage Branding, and Historical Forgery (U Nebraska Press, 2023), National Park Service historian Daniel Ott argues that not only have textbooks and other sources of historical knowledge gotten this wron